Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Starship Registration
I have been watching a lot of Star Trek lately, and I keep thinking about registries. While the TOS Enterprise was NCC-1701, the one from Star Trek: Enterprise is NX-01. Does anyone know how they are different and why? And how come the later Enterprises have a letter affixed to it?
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Good question!
ReplyDeleteNCC designates a commissioned vessels whereas NX designates an experimemtal vessel such as the USS Excelsior. The Excelsior was designated NX-2000 because it was a testbed for the new transwarp drive. When the experiment failed the Excelsior was refitted with standard warp drive and pressed into service with registry NCC-2000. The Enterprise NX-01 was registered as the first "Warp 5" starship
ReplyDeleteSince "Enterprise" was set before the founding of the federation we can assume that Starfleet registry naming conventions were not yet set. Thus the Enterprise became NX class instead of "Enterprise" class. Most ship designs are named for the first ship of the class. Example: NCC-1701 was constituion class, NCC-1701-B was Excelsior class, NCC-1701-C was Ambassador class, NCV-1701-D was galaxy class, and NCV-1701-E was sovereign class.